Dynamic allocation pool limit has been reached

We were having issues with our backup jobs failing on CIFS share backups using Symantec Netbackup. The jobs died with a “status 24”, which means it was losing communicaiton with the source. Our backup administrator provided me with the exact times & dates of the failures and I noticed that immediately preceding his failures this error appeared in the server log on the control station:

A quick google search came up with this description of the error: “The maximum amount of memory (number of 8K pages) allowed for dynamic memory allocation has almost been reached. This indicates that a possible memory leak is in progress and the Data Mover may soon panic. If Max=0(zero) then the system forced panic option is disabled. If Max is not zero then the system will force a panic if dynamic memory allocation reaches this level.”

Based on the fact that the error shows up right before a backup failure I saw the correlation. To fix it, you’lll need to modify the Heap Limit from the default of 0x00030000 to a larger size. Here is the command to do that: